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The exotic animals that bankrolled the forgotten evolutionist

Fred Langford Edwards

By Michael Le Page

These are three of more than 100,000 specimens collected by biologist Alfred Russel Wallace in what is now Malaysia and Indonesia. His main interest was insects but he collected and sold striking animals like this Sulawesi hornbill (above) to support his research.

Specimens like the orangutan (below) would have been gold dust for Wallace, says artist and photographer Fred Langford Edwards, who took these photos as part of a project on “the forgotten evolutionist”. The orangutan was one of three sold to Lord Derby for his museum, now the World Museum in Liverpool, UK. The others were destroyed by bombs in the second world war.

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Fred Langford Edwards

Trading in exotic wildlife is now frowned upon and often illegal, but in Wallace’s time there were no such scruples. And Wallace lacked the money and social connections of Charles Darwin, Edwards points out. He had to support himself.

Unlike Darwin, whose interest in the origin of species arose from a serendipitous posting on the Beagle, Wallace actually set out to investigate the question. In February 1858, during a bout of fever, he independently arrived at the conclusion Darwin had already reached: that natural selection is what drives the evolution of different species. An essay describing his idea was read out at the Linnean Society in London that July, alongside a paper by Darwin. But it got little attention until the publication of Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species the following year.

An ivory-based pitta from the island of Halmahera

Fred Langford Edwards

This article appeared in print under the headline “Exotic investments”